He glares at the greeter at the door and makes a bee line for the assortment of shiny Christmas baubles at the front of the store, grabbing a bunch of packages randomly and stalking towards the self-checkout. By the time he's back in the car it's only been four minutes.
He drives home through the pitch black, having missed every hour of daylight during his twelve-hour shift. Winter as a shift worker fucking sucks. The air is biting but the windows of the cottage glow with soft light as he pulls into his spot out front.
Inside, he finds Eden propped up on the couch, a book open in her lap. Luke sits beside her with a hand on her knee. Tenor is in the kitchen, humming as he stirs a pot. The air smells like chicken and peppers and cumin.
When Eden sees him, she jumps off the couch and throws herself at him, nuzzling under his neck with her face.
She still looks tired, but her colour is better and she smells like she just had a bath. Julius lets himself breathe, really breathe, for the first time all day.
Fourteen Days Until Christmas
Eden
It had been Luke's idea to make Christmas cards to send to his and Tenor's families for the holidays. Perhaps that should have been her first warning that something truly unhinged was about to happen.
She'd helped her students make them before as art projects every December, so she had agreed to the idea quite readily, thoughts of thumb stamp reindeer and beaded Christmas trees flashing through her head.
But when she looks over at Luke where he's sitting beside her at the dinner table, he's gluing what looks like at least forty googly eyes onto an amorphous blob on a piece of red construction paper.
"Um... what exactly is that?" She doesn't want to offend him, but the... creature? monstrosity? looked more like an eldritch horror than a cheerful Christmas greeting.
"A biblically correct angel, obviously," he says, like she should know this very obvious fact.
He folds the paper in half and with a sharpie he writes on the inside 'BE NOT AFRAID! Merry Christmas! Love, Eden, Luke, Tenor, and Julius.'
Tenor blinks at it a few times, then looks down at his own doily cutout angel that he's gluing to a green piece of paper with'Good Tidings of Great Joy!'written across it in red glitter. "Okay... yeah, we'll be sending that one toyourfamily," he says after a minute.
Eden watches with mute horror as Luke starts on another creation, which apparently requires twelve pipe cleaner legs and glitter wings, and she decides not to question him this time as she carves out another potato stamp in the shape of a Christmas tree for her own tidy stack of cards in front of her.
They're almost finished when Julius comes home, and she's wanted to decorate the tree so badly ever since he brought home the decorations, but a wave of fatigue hits her as soon as she sees him. He holds her close and presses a kiss to the top of her head.
It's like he can read her mind, because purrs out a reassuring sound that settles in her belly as he nuzzles a lazy scent mark into her hair, his hands holding her body against his securely. "We can decorate tomorrow, baby. Don't push yourself. Did you take the evening dose of your antibiotic?"
She nods.
He presses another kiss to her lips this time, and it warms her up in a wholly different way.
His eyes darken as he looks down at her, his grip around her tightening, but then he seems to shake himself and he steps back from her, leaving her feeling cold and empty. "Soon, baby. When you're better. Just be patient, I don't want you to overdo it. You're still recovering."
They eat dinner together at the table, and Luke only got a little bit of hot glue on it, which Eden thinks is a much better outcome than it could've been.
Julius pretends not to notice the hungry looks she throws him.
Thirteen Days Until Christmas
Tenor
It's Julius' day off work, which means Luke wakes them all up with the announcement that it's time to decorate the tree. Like Eden and Julius, Tenor has never done this before. When he was growing up, his mother decorated the tree according to the theme and colour scheme of that year and he and his sisters were forbidden on pain of death from touching it and potentially ruining part of her design.
So now, standing in front of the massive evergreen that sheds pine needles everywhere, clutching a tangle of silver garland in his hands, he feels very unprepared.
The tree is still mostly bare, with only one crooked string of lights which Eden and Luke are currently bickering over because she isadamantthat it has been done incorrectly, whereas Lukeis arguing that they actually just needmore lightsand then everything will look right.
Julius is still engaging his best efforts to anchor the whole tree straight and failing miserably, muttering mutinous things about their supplies of matches and gasoline under his breath the whole time.
They've been at this for an hour, the mid-morning sun now cutting through the windows and catching flecks of dust in the air. The house smells like pine and coffee, and Luke has set his computer up to play the Charlie Brown Christmas album, which seems to be steadily raising Julius' volume of threats regarding the tree's limbs.
Tenor tries to intervene with Eden, offering to string the garland to see if that will fix what's wrong with the tree. She looks at him, her eyes catching on the proffered decor and appraising it, then darting over to the tree. She catches her plump lower lip between her teeth and hesitantly nods while frustration and anxiety roll off of her in waves.
